About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

Black Duck was an intellectual property management firm, OSRM was providing warranty services, SpikeSource was offering software dependability services and OpenLogic was providing support for a number of open source packages.Four years later – and two years and a half after Koders‘ acquisition – Black Duck is less about (open source) risk management and more about governance and strategies.

Talking about the latter, I asked Andrew Aitken – Olliance Group’s founder and spokeperson – to comment the acquisition:

With Black Duck’s global sales team and group of highly qualified resellers and 750 existing customers, we look forward to rapidly expending our reach and customer base.

It makes business sense, the challenge ahead seems to integrate all BlackDuck tools and knowledge across their business network to offer consistently “productized services“.

We have successfully partnered with the Olliance Group for the past year, and bringing them into the Black Duck family will enable us to provide customers with end-to-end enterprise-level services and solutions – from FOSS business strategy and policy consulting, to automation and management of their FOSS use. Olliance will also help support our corporate vision of enabling broader FOSS adoption by development teams in enterprises, as well as by individual developers through our Ohloh.net community and our pending integration of our Koders.com code search site into Ohloh. And the acquisition of Olliance completes Black Duck’s transformation into the open source lifecycle adoption and enablement company, which we have been working toward for the past two years.

At Black Duck are definitely living in interesting times, congrats to both Andrew and Tim.

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